March 2014 Dividends/ Option Income

March was a great month for dividends with 12 of my companies paying out.

In March I received a total of $258.07. This is a 149% increase from the $103.64 I made in 2013. I made $59.46 in 2012 and $22.57 in 2011. This is the exact kind of trend I love seeing. While some of the increase was from companies raising their dividends, the huge majority of the gains at this point in my investing life is made from contributions of capital to buy more shares of stock. All the dividends are being reinvested back into the companies they came from.

I also recently added a new category of option income. From here on out I’ll be documenting the monthly gains/losses that I experienced from selling option premium.

First the dividends:

Symbol

Dividend Amount

Shares Bought

@ Price

AFL

$21.84

0.3369

64.84

AVA

$47.29

1.5719

30.0843

BMS

$13.59

0.3433

39.59

BP

$28.85

0.5923

48.71

CVX

$25.62

0.2222

115.29

HRS

$20.58

0.2791

73.7281

IBM

$11.40

0.0609

187.1294

JNJ

$19.94

0.2139

93.217

MCD

$24.70

0.2526

97.7834

TGT

$13.42

0.2185

61.4166

V

$6.02

0.0268

224.584

WFC

$24.82

0.5318

46.673

Total dividends for March 2014: $258.07

Option Income for March 2014:

Symbol

Profit/Loss (including commissions)

Return-on-Investment

AMZN Bull Vertical Put Spread

-$230.89

–

C Bull Vertical Put Spread

$21.93

29.2%

Total option income for March 2014: -$208.96

I lost money on options this month due to the poor performance of my Amazon vertical put spread. Once I have enough money to sell some cash-secured puts I’ll try my hand at a slightly different strategy. I’ll write more about this later.

Update (5/18/2014): Starting off, a lot of what I’ll be doing will be a learning process. Rather than take the loss on the Amazon put spread, what I should have done instead is either close it ahead of time or try to roll it to a later month and/or lower strike for a scratch or maybe even a small credit. Overall, it was a relatively big loss (at least when compared to the income I took in from dividends), but nothing that I couldn’t handle. In the future I’ll have to manage these a bit better.